#7 Shared Mailboxes in Outlook for iOS

By Neil Hobson on 27th August 2019

Back in June this year I remember reading a post on Twitter from Microsoft stating that shared mailbox support was in TestFlight for Outlook for iOS. I also read recently that the functionality was now rolling out. As I had reason to setup a shared mailbox recently, I reminded myself that I should really have written about shared mailbox support in Outlook for iOS a few weeks ago. So just in case you’d missed the announcement, or have forgotten to setup your shared mailboxes in Outlook for iOS, I thought I’d write a quick note about it.

It’ll be a quick note because it’s a Tuesday morning and it’s just been a Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK! By the way, just in case you’re wondering what TestFlight for Outlook for iOS is, you can read about it here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/QkU4VS1s

Back to shared mailboxes. These have been around in Exchange for a while, giving the ability for a group of people to each access an additional mailbox shared between them. A typical example is a ‘support’ mailbox accessed by a team of support staff that each have their own personal mailboxes. In this example, when one of the support staff sends an email from the shared mailbox, the email looks like it has been sent from the shared mailbox rather than the support staff’s individual mailbox.

Adding a shared mailbox in Outlook for iOS is straightforward. In Outlook for iOS, you will see the Add Shared Mailbox option when you tap the Add Account button. An example is shown here:

If you have already setup multiple mailboxes in Outlook for iOS, you will then need to select the mailbox that has access to the shared mailbox. At the next screen, you will be asked to enter the email address of the shared mailbox after which you just tap the Add Shared Mailbox button.

After this, the shared mailbox is selectable the same way as any other mailbox. Below we can see a support staff member has opened the support shared mailbox and can see an email from User1:

As we would expect, a quick reply using Outlook for iOS from the support mailbox sees the reply being sent from the support mailbox and not the mailbox of the individual accessing the shared mailbox. Here’s the view of the reply that User1 sees:

This is a welcome feature for Outlook for iOS. Note that, according to comments I’ve seen from Microsoft, this feature only works with Exchange Online mailboxes.

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